Why community-owned grocery stores like co-ops are the best recipe for revitalizing food deserts

Author

Assistant Professor of Community and Regional Development, University of California, Davis

Disclosure statement

Catherine Brinkley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Nonetheless, the lack of one, particularly in urban neighborhoods, is often a broader sign of disinvestment. In addition to selling food, supermarkets act as economic generators by providing local jobs and offering the convenience of neighborhood services, such as pharmacies and banks.

I believe every neighborhood should have these amenities. But how should we define them?

U.K.-based public health researchers Steven Cummins and Sally Macintyre coined the term in the 1990s and described food deserts as low-income communities whose residents didn’t have the purchasing power to support supermarkets.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture began looking at these areas in 2008, when it officially defined food deserts as communities with either 500 residents or 33% of the population living more than a mile from a supermarket in urban areas. The distance jumps to 10 miles away in rural areas.

The map shows how many people in different counties across the country lived in food deserts in 2015.USDA ERS

Although the agency has created three other ways to measure food deserts, we stuck with the original 2008 definition for our study. By that measure, about 38% of U.S. Census tracts were food deserts in 2015, the latest data available, slightly down from 39.4% in 2010.

Michelle Obama makes it a priority

The Food Trust was among the first to tackle the problem. In 2004, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit used US$30 million in state seed money to help finance 88 supermarket projects throughout Pennsylvania, which helped make healthy food available to about 400,000 underserved residents.

How to grow in a food desert

We wanted to dig deeper and see just how many of the new stores were actually supermarkets and how they’ve fared.

I teamed up with Benjamin Chrisinger, Jose Flores and Charlotte Glennie and examined press releases, website listings and scholarly studies to assemble a database of supermarkets that had announced plans to open new locations in food deserts since 2000.

We were particularly interested in the driving forces behind each project.

We identified only 71 supermarket plans that met our criteria. Of those, 21 were driven by government, 18 by community leaders, 12 by nonprofits and eight by commercial interests. Another dozen were driven by a combination of government initiative with community involvement.

Then we looked at how many actually stuck around. We found that all 22 of the supermarkets opened by community or nonprofits are still open today. Two were canceled, while six are in progress.

In contrast, nearly half of the commercial stores and a third of the government developments have closed or didn’t it make it past planning. Five of the government/community projects also failed or were canceled.

Why co-ops succeeded

Importantly, 16 of the 18 community-driven cases were structured as cooperatives, which are rooted in their communities through customer ownership, democratic governance and shared social values.

Community engagement is vital to opening and sustaining a new store in neighborhoods where residents are understandably skeptical of outside developers and worry about gentrification and rising rents. Cooperatives often adopt local hiring practices, pay living wages and help residents counteract inequities in the food system. Their model, in which a third of the cost of opening typically comes from member loans, ensures communities are literally invested in their new stores and their use.

The Mandela Co-op, which opened in a West Oakland, California, food desert in 2009, is a great example of this. The worker-owned grocery store focuses on purchasing from farmers and food entrepreneurs of color. As a result of its success, the Mandela Co-op is expanding and supporting the local economy at the same time many commercial supermarkets are closing locations as the grocery industry consolidates.

Our study suggests policymakers and public health officials interested in improving wellness in food deserts should take community ownership and involvement into account.

The success of a supermarket intervention is predicated on use, which may not happen without community buy-in. Supporting cooperatives is one way to ensure that shoppers show up.